


Ruined Empires and Dust

by youworeblue



Series: Bloodied and Broken [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, warrior inquisitor - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:27:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26666689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youworeblue/pseuds/youworeblue
Summary: Dreams and Fade encounters.With her lust for knowledge, open mind, and unorthodox upbringing, it was only a matter of time before Ixchel picked up on the trail Solas was so cleverly leaving behind.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan
Series: Bloodied and Broken [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1969189
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Adamant, Inquisitor Ixchel is very sad. Take it from me that Solas has come to admire her curiosity and compassion at this point.

She walked into his dream like she owned that corner of the Fade. When she found him, they shared a long look that betrayed neither of their thoughts. He had been in a pensive mood, and he took his time studying the curious sight of this dreamer. It was not that he was unhappy to see her there, exactly. Nor was he entirely surprised; it had been nearly a year with the Anchor in her hand, and, as observant and canny as she was, she had developed a much more nuanced grasp of its magics than he thought possible for a simple warrior.

She did not seem surprised, which meant that perhaps she had been searching for him. It remained to be seen whether she had been lucidly searching for him in the Fade, or if she thought she were merely lost in a fog of dreams.

The Inquisitor did not give any indication that she was about to speak or move, so at last, he called out to her. _"Da'len?"_

She blinked at him. "I wanted to speak to you in private, but I don't mean to intrude too much." She shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know how to knock on someone else's consciousness, exactly."

Solas tilted his head. "You could have asked before we retired."

"I don't know if I could have," she admitted. "Maybe it would have been safer. But I can dream up courage here I do not have in the waking world."

That made him wonder. He quirked an eyebrow at her. He did not ask her why she needed courage. He trusted her enough that she would tell him, if he allowed her to stay. He also trusted her to leave if he asked her to.

Solas stood from where he had been reclining against the trunk of an ancient tree and loped over to her. As he went, he pulled the both of them out of the Emerald Graves and back to his rotunda in Skyhold. He had intended for it to be a comforting change of scenery, but she was strangely more nervous in their home than he had anticipated.

Her eyes darted around the room at the frescoes, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the paint begin to bleed. Solas moved closer to put his hands on her shoulders. "Focus, _da'len_. I apologize. Where would you prefer to speak?"

Ixhel's eyes refocused on the pendant hanging against his chest, and she took a step back from him, out of his grasp. The rotunda melted away and became the Emerald Graves again--this time in a ruin atop a hill. A large statue of the watchful wolf stood in the center.

He could guess as to why she brought him there, if she were feeling so nervous. She was on high ground. She could see for quite a ways in any direction. She could run, should she need to, and disappear.

 _"Ir abelas,"_ she murmured.

He inclined his head. "You are not intruding. I'm rather impressed with your control."

She raised the hand that contained the Anchor and flexed her fingers to allow its light to dance around her. Then she skirted around him to approach the statue. "I'm still nervous," she murmured as she passed by Solas. He turned to watch her put a hand on the wolf's shoulder. "Solas... Who are you trying to tell? Do you want me to know?"

The forest fell silent around him, tuned as it was to her desire for focus--focus on his response. Even with her back to him, she was observing him from all angles.

He was not at all certain of what she was speaking of. He stood rooted to the spot, arms behind his back, hands clasped. He dropped his head to the side to watch her obliquely.

They had been wandering the Exalted Plains for some time now--and before that, the Emerald Graves. She had taken him, Cole, and Varric in search of history and mystery, as Varric had put it, and they had found plenty of both. But Solas had noticed that her usual scholarly mood had soured. Instead of bubbling with glee as they uncovered secrets and learned something new about the lands they wandered, she had been pensive and quiet.

Solas had thought it to be the ghosts of Adamant haunting what once had been her only escape. Everything about her had been sharper, darker, heavier, in the wake of their siege. It did catch him slightly off-guard to find _himself_ placed at the center of her thoughts instead.

His silence had stretched too long, and she turned to face him. Her expression was one of utter trepidation--nearly a cringe. He tried to remain inscrutable, but he did not enjoy having that look turned upon him as though he were something she feared.

"I do not read minds, _da'len_ ," he said in a low voice. "You'll need to indulge me with a more complete question."

She tightened her grip on the statue. "You're ancient. You're a survivor."

He immediately tensed, and a shadow passed across her face. But she continued in spite of it.

"More than that... You..."

"You are reaching beyond yourself," he warned, but even his ambiguity seemed to be a confirmation to her.

Her knuckles were white on the stone now. Ixhel's scars twisted in a terrible expression of fear and desperate vulnerability. He could feel it roll off of her: a question about the boundary, before she might cross it.

But--and he could not explain to himself exactly why--he did not dissuade her.

"Do I need to say it, Solas?" she asked softly. "You were there. You knew _her_. These--" she jerked her head briefly toward the wolf statue, then back at him "--are a tribute to _you."_

He did not move. He fixed her with the sharpest of looks, and he knew that she knew. Not every secret he had, perhaps, but certainly the source of them all.

He recalled her initial question, and he tried to soften himself, if only for appearance's sake. He did not know what she intended to do if her suspicions were confirmed, but he did know about those Dalish superstitions and the fear clearly written across her features.

"I do not know the answer, myself," he admitted quietly. "Maybe I told myself no one would put it together until long after I was gone."

Ixhel made a noise in the back of her throat as she choked on what might have been a laugh.

"Yes," he said. "I underestimated you."

But the tension had only grown between them, and she seemed like she would break at any second and be sent flying down the hillside like a missile. "What are you afraid of, _da'len?_ " he asked.  
  
"If you did _not_ want to be found out," she said, "and if you don't trust me..." She chewed her lip for a moment, and then her face twisted with the same fear and grief she had held in her eyes. "I would not hold it against you if you killed me, Fen'Harel."  
  
Something snapped across his skin as he heard her name him, and he shivered. "I will not," he said firmly.

She seemed to sag, held up only by the stone she gripped so tightly. "I... You are one of my _dearest_ friends--"

At last, he understood.

"That is no trick, Ixhel."

He approached her unhurriedly, but neither did he stalk her. Her skin jumped at every false breeze in the Fade, and her dark eyes, bruised as they were from late nights and exhaustion, were locked on him still with an edge of doubt. He towered over her and reached out to remove her hand from the guardian statue of Fen'Harel. He brought that hand between them and ran his fingers across her knuckles and wrist to chase away the tension there.

"Yes," he said, "I am a survivor. There was a great catastrophe, and many fled the world for uthenera in the wake of it. Dreaming for so long was once no great task, but I woke to the Conclave and found myself weak and lost in a world I did not recognize. I was swept up in the events of the Conclave... And then..."

He paused. She was regarding the hand he had trapped in his own with heavy eyes, and his chest constricted at that look. He was becoming familiar with the sensation, and it no longer held the same thrill as it did when he was a much younger man. Instead, it only made him feel unbearably heavy.

"And then I stayed." He let his words hang between them, as charged as she would allow them to be. They both knew why he had stayed. And why he had continued to stay. Solas thought it was telling that she still did not look up at him, so he changed the subject. "Once, I was known as Fen'Harel. As I have told you many times before...your Dalish history has forgotten much, and rumors and myths have been taken as fact."

The corner of her mouth twitched. "You have taught me to make no assumptions," she murmured.

"And I am grateful you have held on to that lesson." He offered her a soft smile. "You wonder perhaps why I have not revealed any of this, even to you, in light of our recent brushes with ancient history? Fen'Harel was a mask I once wore, and I became that mask. Your apostate hedge mage is also a mask I have become...but it is closer to the truth than I have walked in a long time. Maybe I did not want to give that up, _da'len_. _"_

She squeezed one of his hands briefly and sighed. "But the Dread Wolf is enough a part of you that you think it's a deception, and you've been leaving a trail back to him, Solas."

He continued to smooth his fingers across the back of her hand. "In my pride, I did think no one would notice."

Ixhel remained focused on their hands, and from his high angle all he could see was the tip of one of her ears twitch against a lock of her hair.

"What are you thinking, _da'len?"_

"You must have so _many_ stories," she said. "So many memories."

"Of ruined empires and dust."

She looked up at him with the corner of her lower lip caught between her teeth. After a moment of contemplation, she raised their joined hands to her cheek. Around them, their surroundings faded once again into the walls of the rotunda.

"Have you always been an artist?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-Trespasser. Ixchel keeps the Inquisition, but all her dearest friends have left...

Ixchel lay between the paws of the statue and looked out at the Graves. The trees, whose namesakes she had learned by heart, were framed by the crumbling pillars of whatever this place had once been--a shrine, or a gathering place, or simply a shelter, she did not know. 

It frustrated her to dream like this. She still could not commune well enough with Spirits to learn about the places she visited in the Fade, and her one-time repository of historical accounts had left her to pursue the end of the world.

In her dreams, she allowed herself to wonder the things that were too painful go consider in the waking world. Staring out at the Emerald Graves, she wondered how much more beautiful Arlathan might have been. What beauty and splendor could drive someone to destroy a world twice over for the sake of its memory?

It began to rain in her dream, and she sank back deeper under the stone wolf's chin for shelter. The rains were warm, but she wanted to feel enclosed. She wanted to rest. 

When she returned her weary gaze to the same framed outlook, she saw him standing in her way. He did not appear as his massive six-eyed representation but rather as a pale gray wolf. He wasn't even particularly massive, all things considered. But he possessed the shining blue eyes of the Elvhen god she had met and befriended and indeed come to love in such complicated and nuanced a way.

He watched her as she watched the Graves, and she wondered what he wondered as he stared.

She could never rise to her moods in the Fade these days. She wished she could scream at him. She wished she could try to kill him. She wished she could question him.

But in the Fade reflection of her twisted, cracked mind, all she felt was the existentially threatening exhaustion.

She wondered what she looked like, curled as she was in the paws ofthis statue. Was her represented form as emaciated as her soul felt? Was she hollow? Was she transparent, losing mass, losing her grasp on reality like she felt she was in the waking world?

"Why did you never ask me to come?" she thought to herself. "Why couldn't you trust me?"

The wolf lowered its head.

She lay back in the arms of the statue and fell asleep in the Fade. And then she was in the Basin again, kneeling with Ameridan, except there was no Ameridan after all. Instead she was the one who held back Hakkon. And it wasn't her face she wore, as it was now, haggard and shredded and disfigured by the Inquisiton. No, this girl who would give up her life to hold back the end of the world was her younger self: younger than even the woman who had become the Herald of Andraste and thrown herself in front of a dragon. She saw herself reflected in the ice beneath her feet, and her tears froze along her nose before they could fall and disturb the image.

The young Ixchel clutched the sword of the Inquisiton instead of a staff, and where her fingers were tight along the blade, they bled.

Ixchel, as she was, the dreamer, raised her eyes to look at the intruder. The wolf was prowling at the periphery, his blue gaze fixed uneasily on the giant six-eyed shadow who loomed over her in Hakkon's place.

"If you shut me out because you wanted me to live some sort of normal life before you end this world..." She trailed off, voice quelled by exhaustion and sorrow.

And then suddenly, she was the one standing at the edge of the cavern and it was Solas--her Solas, the man, the god--who held the would-be wolf apocalypse at bay.

He struggled to meet her eyes just as he had the last time she had really seen him dressed in this armor. But whether it was a reflection of her psyche or his, the armor was in fact slightly different: it was her wolf pelt, the one she had hunted and skinned and cured for him, that adorned his shoulder, and he wore the gloves she had made for him, and they were flecked with paint...

She tore her gaze away to find that he still could not quite look at her.

"We could be sad together, vhenan," she said. Her quip was distant and distorted as though she spoke through thick ice. She meant it with all the bitterness and all the humor it could hold. "You have always underestimated me."

"And you have always held me in too high regard," he replied.

She felt it then: the cold. It has been so harsh that it nearly felled Bull before they had defeated the Jaws. She had urged them to fly from torch to torch and sconce to sconce to keep warm, and kept a strict timeline of when to leave in case they thought they might fall.

Her time was running out.

"Maybe...maybe I am Solas first." He offered her a self-depracating smirk that was bereft of humor, and at last he raised his eyes to hers. "Perhaps I am too proud to have you witness my failure, should it come to to pass."

He looked away again as he released his grip on the dream and stood from his crouch. The six-eyed shadow that hung above him crashed around them in a howling gale of darkness and fury, and it was so cold that she was nearly snapped from her dream. She drowned in the tempest and her eyelids fluttered to see her room in Skyhold--

But his hand on her arm--her arm, her arm, not her missing arm but the one that remained--jolted her back to him, deep in the Fade.

"We spoke of victories," they said together, Dread Wolf and the Inquisitor. She nodded without raising her eyes from the intricate metalwork of his cuirass. Somewhere behind the scales was his heavy heart. And then there was her.

"Would you rather I disappear?"

The words came unbidden, loosed by the Fade around them. But they emboldened her.

"Would it be easier--"

"Vhenan." His voice was sharp, and his grip on her arm tightened unforgivingly. "No."

"It would be easier for me!" she ground out through her teeth and her tears. "What am I supposed to do, Solas? Get married, have a child? Why would I do such a thing? Even if there was a man whom I loved, the days of this world are numbered, and they will end in pain. Shall I retreat to a temple and hope the ancient magics that protected them from the raising of the Veil will protect them from its fall? Shall I become a Sentinel to a shadow world that no one would miss, because the next will be so much better? Shall I--"

Solas covered her mouth with his hand. His breaths were sharp through his nose with either anger or pain, she couldn't tell. She didn't care. Or more accurately it didn't make a difference to her.

Tears slipped down her face and met his fingers, then his wrists, where they dripped delicately. 

It was the Fade. She didn't need to speak to pose questions to him.

"How is this better than dying by your side?" She closed her eyes to focus on the feeling of hot sorrow clinging to her eyelashes and cooling on her cheeks. "How is this better than being dead before it comes to pass?"

The Fade trembled around them, but Solas's attention hardly wavered from her.

"You don't love me enough to kill me?"

"Oh, vhenan."

He allowed his hand to slip from her mouth, and he bent to touch his forehead to hers. "I thought it would have been so much kinder to have left you when we were merely traveling companions. I thought that it was cruel to let you love me. To allow myself..."

She swallowed a strangled laugh. She wanted to beat it against his chest: she loved all of her friends so deeply, it wouldn't have mattered if they were lovers or not. The degree of hurt that could be blamed on her knowledge of his feelings for her paled in comparison to the pain of his betrayal, his lack of trust in her, and how he had rendered her existence futile from the beginning.

His breath against her face--she could feel it, smell it like it were real, and she did not dare to enjoy it but her heart was a traitorous fool--

"You are not futile. You have made the world worthy, as you are," he whispered against her forehead. "You have alleviated suffering. You have inspired so many. And when this world is ruined empires and dust, I will carry your memory. Many will." He slid his arms around her, and he radiated a coolness that was both unnatural and comforting. "Lethallan...vhenan..." His hands in her hair were cool, like rivulets of water down her scalp and neck. "You have a home now. You have a family of friends more loyal than any given by blood. You have the power to shape the world within you even now..."

_It's not home without you. And everyone else is leaving. Now does not matter when there is no joy in it, and no hope for the future._

She could not utter it, even in the Fade. She had been described so often as hopeful, a beacon of hope, a source of hope, the world's hope. To admit that she no longer believed in hope at all...The words were too bleak for utterance--but the emotion was enough. 

"You're weak," she rasped instead. "And selfish. And honey-tongued." And then she fisted her hands in the wolf pelt, the straps of his armor, and she clung to him, forced her conviction into the Fade to strengthen her point. "I don't want to die alone, Solas."


	3. The Well of All Things

Tears slipped down the sides of her face and into her hair. But she was made of tears, and surrounded by tears. They were warm, soft as silk, sad, all around her. She floated in a sea of tears.

Something beyond her own sorrows stirred in that sea. How small her pain seemed, in that endless depth of memory, of feeling, of existence: the ocean that carried everyone. And yet even so, each of her tears left ripples upon ripples, touched so many other sorrows. Few others had such reach, here.

But the Proud Wolf roamed the Beyond, and it was the wolf who found her: fur against her skin. Nose under her hand.

She reached for him with her arm that was not an arm, and he slipped through her fingers. He remained just out of reach as he drew her upward, to semi-consciousness, but she wanted to drown here. It was an irony, that she felt so much lighter at the bottom of that well.

But even as she sank, the wolf bore her upward.

 _You did this,_ she told him. _Betrayer. Varu u’em._

The wolf understood, but in naming him such, he was enabled to defy her.

_Vyn alas’niremah i’em?_

She reached again, and he allowed her to grasp his fur. He lifted her, spun her, swirled through the Strange Place. Other voices called to her: screams from a dying world. Reality broke through like a sharp beam of light into the darkest of old chateaus. She screamed at the light, at its searing edges, at its sharpness.

_“My dear friend! We have no time!”_

She clung to the wolf, but it danced away from her again.

_Nuva tarasyldhe re uth’su mar’veth._

The ocean began to empty, all at once, like a cracked basin. Its gravity, the downward suction, was too much to resist. But still she reached for him. The Proud Wolf stood against that backdrop, and he watched not the destruction of all that he had loved. Rather, he watched the one who he had destroyed with his love.

Blood and fire spilled in to take the place of the memories that poured out with her. Material mixed with Fade in an endless loop—one she was about to escape.

 _I have destroyed many things in my pride,_ he told her. _I have not spared you. Even now._

He remembered her amid his failure at the end of the world. He remembered her: able-bodied, brave, unyielding, kind, and full of love he did not deserve. That was how he returned her to the world. It was his last gift, and his last curse, to saddle her with his belief, his faith. In her, he imbued his last hope.

Spirits shrouded him, clung to him, attracted by his might and sorrow—seeking protection. And they sang to him. They sang to him as the song of the world faltered, as the pillars that sang the world into continuity cracked and succumbed, as the well of all things poured dry and refilled itself in discordant waves:

_And the trees are now turning_   
_from green to gold._   
_And the sun is now fading._   
_I wish I could hold you closer._

_Nuva mar’shos’lahn’en ir’tel’dera Fen’Harel._

_With a sigh, you turn away._   
_With a deepening heart…_   
_no more words to say._   
_You will find that the world_   
_has changed forever._

_Dareth shiral, vhenan._


End file.
